Dr. Vila is in her second decade of working as an educator. Her teaching experiences include teaching middle school mathematics as both a core teacher and an interventionist and teaching high school mathematics courses. She has also taught middle school geography and computers and high school-level computer science. While teaching since 2007, Dr. Vila has held numerous committee and leadership positions including participating on a Remote Instructional Team during the COVID-19 pandemic and presenting a two-day professional development workshop on inquiry teaching.

Dr. Vila also works with adult learners. She designed and taught a six-week Massachusetts Tests for Educator License (MTEL) preparation course for teachers at the Boston Higashi School in Randolph, Massachusetts. The course prepared its participants for the Massachusetts General Curriculum (03) Mathematics subtest. She continues to work with adult learners as a private tutor for both the General Curriculum (03) Mathematics subset and the Mathematics Middle School (47) test. Most recently, she taught a mathematics problem solving course and a math education course at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Besides the traditional teaching experiences noted above, Dr. Vila has taught in Uganda, Africa and Nepal, Asia during summer vacations. In Uganda, Dr. Vila designed and implemented a series of lessons which culminated in an exam identical to one she had given to her American students. She was then able to compare test results from her Ugandan students to her American students. In this way, Dr. Vila was completing independent research projects long before starting her formal research degree program. Her experiences overseas helped Dr. Vila gain an interest in international education.